ed glumly to
the January blasts making an Aeolian trombone of the empty street.

"Wait," he said to the disappearing genie. "As I came home across
the end of the square I saw many men standing there in rows. There
was one mounted upon something, talking. Why do those men stand in
rows, and why are they there?"

"They are homeless men, sir," said Phillips. "The man standing on
the box tries to get lodging for them for the night. People come
around to listen and give him money. Then he sends as many as the
money will pay for to some lodging-house. That is why they stand in
rows; they get sent to bed in order as they come."

"By the time dinner is served," said Chalmers, "have one of those
men here. He will dine with me."

"W-w-which--," began Phillips, stammering for the first time during
his service.

"Choose one at random," said Chalmers. "You might see that he is
reasonably sober--and a certain amount of cleanliness will not be
held against him. That is all."

It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the Caliph. But
on that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional antidotes to
melancholy. Something wanton and egregious, something high-flavored
and Arabian, he must have to lighten his mood.

On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the
lamp. The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the
delectable dinner. The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily
in the glow of the pink-shaded candles.

And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal--or held in charge
a burglar--wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the
line of mendicant lodgers.

It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be
used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through
fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting
hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed--a rite insisted
upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In
the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the
apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes
with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's
comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and
conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were
full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur's that
is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high,
but a quarter inch of